In the climax of a selection process that took nine months, a blindfolded boy in an altar ballot has drawn the name of the new pope of the 18-million-member Coptic Orthodox Church.
Bishop Tawadrous of Beheira was chosen on November 4 — his 60th birthday — to be the 118th Pope of Alexandria and Patriarch of All Africa. The ceremony took place during a liturgical service in St Mark’s Cathedral, Cairo.
None of the three candidates in the ballot was present, each spending the evening in a different monastery.
Bishop Tawadrous will be enthroned on November 18 as Pope Theodoros II.
”He is a very spiritual man and is known to not like the limelight, but we couldn’t be happier,” the president of the United States Association of Copts, Michael Meunier, told Vatican Radio. “Everybody wanted a leader who could unite Egypt’s Christians in these very difficult times, a man of dialogue, and I believe he can do this.”
Emad Gad, a political analyst at Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies and a member of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, said: “We think that he will be a wise man, he will be moderate, and he will try to work towards an Egyptian agenda. He will try to renew the role of the church and concentrate on the spiritual, not political aspects.”
Gad said the timing of the papal selection was critical in the context of anxiety among Christians over their place in Egypt.
He predicted the new pope would face problems in areas like the Constituent Assembly (on which the Coptic Orthodox have been arguing for better representation of minorities); the kidnapping of Christian girls by radical Muslims; the issue of religious conversions; and the difficulty of obtaining permission to build a church.
“It depends on how [President Mohamed] Morsy will treat him,” he said. “If [Morsy] tries to approach it from an Islamic point of view, you can expect…clashes between the state and the church.”
Sources:
The Coptic Orthodox Church Centre UK
Image: Daily News, Egypt